MATLAB: How to read in dates stored as strings from an Excel sheet into MATLAB 7.0 (R14)

Question

The release notes mention using a cell array to read in dates which are stored as strings from an Excel sheet. But I cannot find this specific date-reading syntax. The documentation on XLSREAD does not mention how to read in string date information from an Excel file.

I have an Excel file called Book1.xls which has a date value in cell A1 as a string. I use the following syntax but it only returns an empty matrix:

a = XLSREAD('Book1.xls','Sheet1');

Answer 1

This bug has been fixed in Release 2007b (R2007b). For previous product releases, read below for any possible workarounds:

Documentation on using XLSREAD to read in string format dates is missing from the manual.

Here is additional information on performing this:

You can use the dual output syntax of XLSREAD to retrieve string format dates from an Excel file. For example, the command

[numbers dates] = xlsread('Book1.xls','Sheet1');

returns the string dates in the Excel sheet in the variable 'dates'.

For more information on the different syntaxes of XLSREAD, execute the following at the MATLAB command prompt:

doc xlsread